There’s something magical about trees. If you think back to your early childhood memories, there is a tree in there somewhere. I distinctly remember a large tree that was gloriously green in the summer that had white bark that you could peel off like thick paper. I remember sitting in front of it as a little girl and slowly peeling away a layer of bark and pretending like I was cultivating paper to create stories or drawings with. What a gift that dear tree bestowed upon the story of my childhood pages.
Many trees in our memories or in our current backyards were born or cultivated before we were even born. Many outlive human life and are legacies or story tellers of life that happened around them. There’s a tree on our property that has an arrow buried deep in the bark, deep enough to know that the bark has begun to grow around it. What games must have been played there once upon a time. It draws us to wonder.
Like moss, trees provide the air we so thoroughly need to breathe. Not only do they gift us with basic life substance, but we provide trees the air they need to breathe! We breathe in their exhale, and they breathe in ours. So incredible. The poetry of it is breath taking, especially when you look at images of the lungs.
How could the mechanism that takes in breath have a visual resemblance to that which gives it what it needs, if all things just happened by chance and without design? It’s beyond our comprehension how many things in nature are like that, metaphors or representations of deeper purpose or meaning. Wonder is just waiting in each breath we are graced with.